Justin Engler and Paul Vines will demo a robot called the Robotic Reconfigurable Button Basher (R2B2) at Defcon; it can work its way through every numeric screen-lock Android password in 19 hours.
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PIN-punching $200 robot can brute force every Android numeric screen-password in 19 hours
Charlie writes, “There is a smoke shop in Scotia NY, owned by a young black man. There are many, many smoke shops in the capital region, but the rest are owned by white people.
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Head-shop CCTV catches police informant/undercover planting crack
We can’t know for sure exactly how we’re going to die, but some ways of going are more common than others. The National Safety Council has calculated the probability of dying from a variety of causes in this interesting graphic. Read more…
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Here Are Your Odds of Dying from the Most Common Causes of Death
Last month we reported that Apple was to provide iPads to the Los Angeles school district. At the time, the numbers looked like only a slice of the region’s 640, 000 students would receive the hardware (just 31, 000 of them initially). A new update today indicates that this is actually just the first wave, and in fact every one of the region’s kids will benefit from the scheme — as confirmed by Mark Hovatter, chief facilities executive for LAUSD. This is of course great news for those in the area, but not all that bad for Apple’s bottom line , either, we’re guessing. Filed under: Tablets , Apple Comments Via: 9 to 5 mac
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Los Angeles School District iPad scheme confirms all 640,000 students will benefit
schwit1 writes “Stomping on the brakes of a 3, 500-pound Ford Escape that refuses to stop–or even slow down–produces a unique feeling of anxiety. In this case it also produces a deep groaning sound, like an angry water buffalo bellowing somewhere under the SUV’s chassis. The more I pound the pedal, the louder the groan gets–along with the delighted cackling of the two hackers sitting behind me in the backseat. Luckily, all of this is happening at less than 5mph. So the Escape merely plows into a stand of 6-foot-high weeds growing in the abandoned parking lot of a South Bend, Ind. strip mall that Charlie Miller and Chris Valasek have chosen as the testing grounds for the day’s experiments, a few of which are shown in the video below. (When Miller discovered the brake-disabling trick, he wasn’t so lucky: The soccer-mom mobile barreled through his garage, crushing his lawn mower and inflicting $150 worth of damage to the rear wall.) The duo plans to release their findings and the attack software they developed at the hacker conference Defcon in Las Vegas next month–the better, they say, to help other researchers find and fix the auto industry’s security problems before malicious hackers get under the hoods of unsuspecting drivers.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Hackers Reveal Nasty New Car Attacks
First time accepted submitter Dawn Kawamoto writes “Want to become more efficient? Try lopping off 250 workers. That’s what BlackBerry did this week — saying it was a move to become more efficient. From the article: ‘“This is part of the next stage of our turnaround plan to increase efficiencies and scale our company correctly for new opportunities in mobile computing. We will be as transparent as possible as those plans evolve, ” says Lisette Kwong, a company spokeswoman.'” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
At CNET, Declan McCullagh reports that the U.S. government has demanded that large Internet companies provide them with users’ stored passwords, which are typically encrypted.
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Feds tell major internet companies to decrypt and hand over users’ account passwords
It’s been a rough year for Zynga, which ousted founder Mark Pincus earlier this month. Fortune Live Media In its latest earnings statement filed Thursday with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Zynga reported the number of daily average users (DAU) dropped to 39 million in the second quarter of 2013—the lowest ever since the company began keeping track. Last quarter, the DAU fell to the then-lowest record, 52 million users . The fall to 39 million means that 25 percent of its daily user base stopped using Zynga products in just one quarter. Not surprisingly, Zynga’s bottom line fell too. The company sustained a net loss of $15.8 million in Q2 2013. (Last quarter, the gaming firm profited just $4.1 million.) The market wasn’t too thrilled with these numbers: in after-hours trading, Zynga’s stock price plummeted by nearly 15 percent. The once top-dog has gone through a bit of a rough patch during the last year. In the summer of 2012, the company quickly lost a bunch of executives and managers. That October, the company announced that it had overpaid for OMGPOP (maker of Draw Something ). More recently, Mark Pincus, the company’s founder, was ousted as CEO in early July 2013. Then Zynga suddenly shut down OMGPOP last month as well. Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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Game over for Zynga? Firm loses 25 percent of daily active users in one quarter
Gaming giant Activision Blizzard announced it’s buying out most of majority shareholder Vivendi’s stake, at a total price of about $8.2 billion. Activision will pay about $5.83 billion in cash to Vivendi for 429 million shares, while an investment group led by CEO Bobby Kotick and co-chairman Brian Kelly will pick up 172 million shares for $2.34 billion, leaving Vivendi with 83 million shares, or about 12 percent of the company. The publisher of titles like Call of Duty and World of Warcraft (and Guitar Hero before it ran that into the ground) Activision is reporting preliminary results for Q2 of $1.05 billion in net revenue and raised its full-year revenue outlook slightly, although full results won’t be available until August 1st. As Joystiq mentions, Vivendi has been unsuccessfully trying to sell its part of the company for nearly a year, hopefully this transaction works out the best for everyone. By everyone, we mean people still waiting for StarCraft: Ghost . Filed under: Gaming , HD Comments Via: Joystiq Source: Activision
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Activision Blizzard is going independent, buying out Vivendi for $8 billion
In what could prove to be a major breakthrough in quantum memory storage and information processing, German researchers have frozen the fastest thing in the universe: light. And they did so for a record-breaking one minute. Read more…